Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

In a lot of ways, success is much harder than I thought it would be. I figured that you’d get here and then everything would be happily ever after. But, it’s hard work, almost harder once you’re successful because you’ve got to maintain it.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

I never expect to see a perfect work from an imperfect man.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

If you’re really satisfied with your position on something, you just say, ‚Hey;‘ you just very calmly present something.

When you’re a pop star, it’s a little conservative; you always have to stay in a box. You have fans that are five and fans that are 65; there are so many people wanting so many things.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

On the summit of Everest, I had a feeling of great satisfaction to be first there.

The Premier League is one of the most difficult in the world. There’s five, six, or seven clubs that can be the champions. Only one can win, and all the others are disappointed and live in the middle of disaster.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

We are all pleased when our names are pronounced and spelled correctly.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Before I was born, my father told my mother, ‚If it’s a boy, he’s going to be a scientist.‘

I think, often, people who run away are people who got into things most enthusiastically, and then they want more. They just demand more of life than what is happening in the moment. Sometimes this is a great mistake, as it’s always a good deal different than you expect it.

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.

Maids want nothing but husbands, and when they have them, they want everything.

To be is to do.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Desire is the very essence of man.

Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

As for our majority… one is enough.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.